


Presumed Dead

by nightwalker



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Clint Needs a Hug, Gen, Iron Man 3 Spoilers, Iron Man 3 missing scene, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-06
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-10 13:15:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightwalker/pseuds/nightwalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The broadcast was live. Millions saw. It only makes sense that some of them would have been Tony's friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Depths

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Iron Man 3. Minor spoilers for Cap 2, kind of?
> 
> This is a series of three brief missing scenes/character pieces showing how people close to Tony react to seeing the attach on Malibu broadcast live. The first chapter is Steve and Natasha, then Clint and Fury, and the best for last will be Rhodey.
> 
> Thanks to Amaronith for giving it a once-over for me.

It's on all the channels. 

He's somewhere in Russia, or someplace near Russia – someplace where the language sounds a little like Russian and Natasha's the only one who can translate, that's all he's got to work with, actually – and he wasn't expecting, when he glanced up from the cup of bitter black coffee he's been nursing for the last thirty minutes, to see anything he recognized on the television.

The captions are all in Cryllic, but he can see the name “Tony Stark” from across the diner.

And he's amused, almost, because of _course_ even in probably-Russia, Tony's making news. Steve's not even surprised to see it, really. Tony is – well, Tony's hard to ignore. And he does a lot of things worth talking about, almost as many as he says he does. Really, why _wouldn't_ he be on the news in a country on the other side of the world? 

He takes another sip of coffee and settles in to watch. Natasha will be a little while yet, and he kind of wants to know what Tony's been up to.

The picture on the screen is just a house – a _big_ house, a really expensive, modern-looking house, so Steve feels safe assuming it's Tony's, especially with his name still emblazoned at the bottom of the screen. It looks like it's being taken from a helicopter and Steve just shakes his head at the brass balls of it all, to spy on someone from the sky like that. Stark's probably used to it by now, but it makes the back of Steve's neck itch, to think of people hovering over him with cameras, watching him fight or buy groceries. It's probably best that Stark's a publicity-hound.

He takes another sip and that's when he sees the vapor trail in the bottom of the screen.

He's not the only one watching and he can hear the chatter around him pick up. “Iron Man,” a woman says in a startled tone, as if she's talking to the television itself and Steve has a ridiculous moment where he hopes Tony hears her.

And then the first missile strikes the house. And the second.

He doesn't remember standing up, but he's pressed in with the rest of the patrons, nearly everyone in the little diner crowded together under the wall-mounted TV, as they try to see. The house is collapsing, the roof is caving in and chunks of concrete and metal are falling into the ocean below. Steve's vision is super-human but the television is old and the resolution is low. It doesn't stop him from scanning all the windows, trying to see something that might look like a person, might look like survivors. 

The flash of muted colors from the top of the screen catches his eye. “There,” he mutters and the camera obeys, panning up to zoom in on the front drive. Iron Man is there, a dark-haired woman clasped in his arms and Steve sucks in a huge breath he hadn't known he'd needed, lets it out in a heavy exhale and grins at the television. Around him everyone is cheering and clapping and when Steve gets back he's going to suggest that SHIELD consider making better use of Iron Man's international popularity. 

Iron Man stumbles, drops the woman and Steve winces a little because they're on the pavement now, but it's still better than being in that house. But the woman is crawling to her feet and Iron Man is – Iron Man is coming apart, the armor pulling away like it's literally ripping itself to pieces and flying back into the house. What's left is Pepper Potts, her hands and face streaked with blood. She's holding her hands out in front of her like she's still wearing the gauntlets and her back is bowed with the force of her screaming.

There is a long minute, where the cameras just watch her.

There's a puff of orange and red, black smoke billowing as one of the attack choppers is destroyed. The camera is on the wrong side of the house now for him to see anything clearly, but there's another explosion a moment later and the third attacker is turning away. Iron Man is clearly fighting back. 

But long moments pass and the third chopper gets further and further away. Steve scans the sky for a glimpse of red and gold but all he can see is blue and white and the huge broken piece of Tony's home collapsing into the ocean.

The reporter is saying something he can't understand and the room around him is exploding into shouts and cries of dismay. The woman beside him, the one who'd shouted at the screen earlier, has both hands pressed against her mouth.

“We have to go,” Natasha says, appearing at his elbow, silent as smoke. Her fingers are curled around his wrist and he belatedly realizes that he has no idea where his coffee has gone. 

“Wait,” Steve says and tips his head toward the television. “I want to – that's Tony-”

“He went in the water,” Natasha says softly. “A couple of minutes ago. The reporters are saying that no one saw him come back up.”

“No,” Steve says. “He had the suit.”

Natasha doesn't say anything, but her fingers grip his wrist tight enough to bruise as the rest of the house breaks loose, thousands of tons of mental and concrete plummeting into the depths.

He wonders if Tony can see it coming, if he's still awake, still alive, or if whatever sent him into the water to begin with had already taken him out.

Something hotter and heavier than fear is already sitting in the back of his throat, a burn like grief.

He can see the water rushing up to meet him, the fear that had soaked through his conviction and his determination, the thought that _drowning would be worse, please let the crash kill me_ and he prays, quietly, while he let Natasha lead him away, that somewhere in the bottom of the Pacific, Tony was already dead.


	2. Rebuilding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint is still rebuilding.

The city is still rebuilding.

New York is a constantly changing mess of scaffolding and traffic cones on the best of days, and in the months since the Chitauri invasion, it's been even worse. Entire streets blocked off around the hulking remains of skyscrapers with the edges sheared off, buildings with walls knocked out, streets with craters the size of swimming pools. The city looked broken for a few weeks. 

Then it got better. In stages. It's not there yet, but it will be, and one day Clint will look around and wonder when the massive reconstruction ended and the usual gentrification and reconstruction and expansion started again.

He's looking forward to that moment. When the rebuilding is done. Maybe by then he'll be done too.

****

Clint is still rebuilding. 

He has ninety days after the invasion to sit on his hands and ignore his therapist and rip through his own thoughts and memories and impulses until he's sure, sure that what Loki built of him is gone. Ninety days of the mostly-empty, too-small apartment that SHIELD has arranged for him, a convalescence residence, the place where they send agents who've been injured in the line of duty who don't have a permanent address of their own (or at least one that can have mail sent to it at an address that doesn't say “Deck 16, The Helicarrier, Location Confidential” which doesn't actually work anyway, Clint's tried, the Post Office is having none of that shit). It's not a bad apartment. Kind of small, but it is New York and SHIELD has a budget to keep to. There's a kitchen with no food in it and a bathroom with a single roll of toilet paper and a freshly unwrapped bar of soap. There's a TV with no reception and no cable and a small bookshelf full of untouched Tom Clancy thrillers and Danielle Steel paperbacks that have been read until they're falling apart. 

He spends his first day insisting he's not that bored, but he can't quite bring himself to go outside and face the city yet and there is literally nothing else to do, and by the end of the day he knows more about a fashion model named Candy and her dysfunctional family than he really needs to.

He spends most of the first week trying not to make a joke about how Coulson must have been there at one point and that's why all the sex-scenes in Fine Things are dog-eared. He fails, ultimately, but Natasha laughs anyway and the next day a bike messenger hand-delivers him a PS3 and about fifty video games and god, he loves her.

****

He doesn't go outside for a while.

Not – he's not agoraphobic all of a sudden. But it feels like a lot of what went on out there is his fault. It's hard to see the open wounds of the city without feeling a little guilty. And it's not like being a shut-in is exactly hard in the Big Apple. You can get almost anything delivered straight to your door, so for the first couple of weeks he does. Groceries, take-out; he even promises the college kid at Gamestop a fifty dollar tip to hand-deliver him a bunch of walk-throughs because video games have gotten a lot harder than he remembered. 

Sometimes he stands in the window and watches the city go by outside. The neighborhood they've got him set up in is pretty much untouched by the invasion, which might have been deliberate on his handler's part. 

Apparently Hill is his handler now. She's pretty high ranking to be minding field agents, even specialists. On his good days Clint figures it's because he's pretty low-maintenance out here. On his bad days he's pretty sure no one else would have him.

He tries very hard not to think about everyone he'd helped Loki kill. Mostly he just thinks about himself. Tries to follow the logic that had seemed so fucking clear to him, so compelling when it was pressed into his mind in a haze of blue light. He tries to figure out if anything he'd done was of his own free will.

Everyone tells him it wasn't, but that doesn't help Clint sleep at night. It hadn't felt like being controlled, it hadn't felt like brainwashing. Everything had made so much sense to him at the time.

Natasha says that's normal. Natasha has learned to sleep at night. Clint holds on to that.

He goes to therapy and tells them what Natasha says they want to hear. It seems to work because they put him on light duty for another ninety days. Paperwork and administrative duties, nothing that would put a weapon in his hands, nothing that makes him responsible for another agent's life. He doesn't resent it. He does his job. It takes him a while to realize that he's not sure what he would do with himself if he never got cleared to go back in the field.

SHIELD is... uncomfortable.

Officially, what Loki did is top secret, but about fifty agents saw Clint land a helicopter full of Loki's thugs on the Helicarrier and a dozen or so more saw his arrow infect the computers. There's really no keeping it quiet after that. It might have been better to just tell everyone because the rumor mill almost certainly has him suffering a psychotic break or carrying Loki's love-child or – well.

Nothing worse than the truth.

****

Eventually he does go outside, if only because he feels like he owes the city that much.

The sun is painfully bright and the streets are oppressively loud. Vendors are selling bootlegged Avengers merchandise on the street corners where the damage is worst. A little boy is begging his mother for a Hawkman doll – a stuffed felt doll wearing a bright purple skirt with a yellow quiver stitched to its back – and when Clint realizes who it's supposed to be he has to brace his hands against his knees and take slow, deep breaths until the dizziness passes.

The guy selling Iron Man-themed sex toys offers him a beer from a cooler beneath his cart and it's really bad that this is the best day Clint's had in weeks.

****

He still doesn't sleep a lot.

It's not because of Loki, exactly. 

At night he can't stop himself from remembering. What Loki had done to him was still there, after all. Loki hadn't made him be not Clint, he'd just made an extremely compelling argument. There had been a strange kind of truth to what Loki – or the scepter, maybe – had shown him. 

He doesn't need Natasha to tell him that's a dangerous game, pulling out all these thoughts and emotions. Dwelling on it is not something his therapist really recommends. 

The thing is, Clint's actually pretty sure that what Loki made of him is gone, undone, rewound. 

He's just not sure if the Clint that's left behind is exactly who he used to be.

****

Clint watches it all go down in Times Square. Him and about a thousand other people pressed in together as the house crumbles into the ocean. One of the off-screen reporters is saying “I think Iron Man's dead, I think they killed Iron Man.” No one is moving, a piece of New York ground to stillness, barely breathing, everyone waiting for a sign.

The panic came after, the high-pitched babble of voices, the sudden press of the crowd. But for a moment it was like the whole city took a breath and held it.

****

Clint isn't back on active duty yet, but when he catches the shuttle to the Helicarrier no one says a word. He isn't alone, what looks like every off-duty SHIELD agent in New York crowding onto the dock with him. No one says anything about him being there, no one even really looks at him and as he settles against the side of the boat and watches the water kick by, choppy from the wind, he figures that's better than it could have been.

Fury and Hill are actually waiting for him when the shuttle docks. Hill's got her arms crossed and is watching him like she thinks he might bolt at any moment. For a moment Clint misses Coulson fiercely, in a way he hasn't let himself over the last few months.

Fury just stands there, permanent scowl firmly in place, one eyebrow raised like he doesn't already know the answer. “I don't believe I called you in, Agent Barton.”

There are rows of screens lining the wall behind Fury and they're all airing the same footage over and over. Clint watches Iron Man hit the water hard and not come up for at least the third time. “Thought you could use the extra hands.”

“We have rules about this sort of thing for a reason,” Fury says, and that's rich, coming from a guy who hasn't taken so much as a single day off in the ten years Clint has been with the agency.

The house is collapsing again and Clint watches it plummet over the edge of the cliff. “He was my teammate. You don't sit around twiddling your thumbs when your team needs you.”

It's Hill who makes the call. Just a sideways tilt of her head and the barest hint of a nod. “Then suit up. Quinjet leaves for Malibu in ten minutes. They won't wait.”

****

His uniform is different – still the basic black Shield jumpsuit, still the purple accents, but there's a stylized “A” emblazoned across the right side of the chest. Clint hovers his hand over it for a minute, wondering if he should touch it, then rolls his eyes at himself and suits up.

Agents clear the hall for him and in the hangar bay a field agent is hanging out the door of the Quinjet, one hand extended to haul him aboard. “Specialist Hawkeye,” she says. “They told us one of the Avengers would be here.”

The response team is strapped in, weapons held across their chests, but they shift their grips and he's standing there as they raise their hands in a salute.

It's partially for Stark, who had technically been his teammate, his partner and is dead at the bottom of the ocean after saving them all. It's partially for the fancy letter A emblazoned across his chest. Maybe some of it is for Clint, who used to be Agent Barton. He's not sure how much of that guy is left. Hawkeye's going to have to do for now.

The Mandarin may not be as bad as Loki, but he's something new and bad and different and that's what Avengers are for.

He taps a finger against the “A” on his chest, like a promise, like a reminder, and grabs a seat as the Quinjet starts to take off.


End file.
